Friday OfcomWatch round-up…

Folks, it’s Friday afternoon — you made it…

* Roger Darlington reports that we should see a new Ofcom chair announced soon.  I agree with Roger that Lord Currie has been an excellent leader.  It will be interesting to see who Lord Carter appoints; it will speak volumes about Ofcom’s independence from government.

* Who is with me on this:  The government should have kept VAT the same and just abolished the BBC licence fee and paid for the corporation out of the VAT pool of funds.  I’m just saying…

* Charlie Beckett looks at 4iP.  He writes:

[Tom Loosemore of 4iP] has already handed out lumps of dosh ranging from £3k to £25k and this Santa of the social Internet has more in his sack.

4iP has more than £40 million from Channel 4 and various other partners (mainly regional development authorities) which is a lot of dosh in these straightened times.

I’m sure someone will set me straight on this, but I hope there is sufficient public accountability for this venture.  In the US, the somewhat similar Telecommunications Development Fund (TDF) has generally been a waste of taxpayers’ money.  If public authorities essentially use the language of ‘investment’ in these situations, taxpayers should rightly be concerned about financial returns on those investments.  Can the returns, if any, be measured in a way that satisfies both the creative types and the types like me that are concerned with government waste?  This is particularly important with 4iP because Channel 4 is seeking public subsidy.

How do we measure success or failure?

* DG SANCO (green paper) on collective redress:

‘On 27 November 2008 the Commission has adopted the Green Paper on Consumer Collective Redress. The Green Paper sets out 4 options.These include: (1) No immediate action, (2) co-operation between Member States extending national collective redress systems to consumers from other Member States without a collective redress mechanism, (3) a mix of policy instruments to strengthen consumer redress (including collective consumer alternative dispute mechanisms, a power for national enforcement authorities to request traders to compensate consumers and extending small claims to deal with mass claims), (4) binding or non binding measures for a collective redress judicial procedure to exist in all Member States.  A combination of different elements from these options is also open to consideration.’

Option 4, option 4, option 4!

It would have been great to have a good class action mechanism in place during the quiz-call and ‘up to 8 mb/s’ broadband scandals.  BTW: Recommended reading — The Reform of Class and Representative Actions in European Legal Systems by Chris Hodges (he mentions the Ofcom GMTV matter).